High Profile: Rex Ellis

Ellis Helps Cw Tell Its Story Of Slavery

WILLIAMSBURG — Rex Ellis's daddy used to drive through the historic section of Williamsburg every day during the 1950s, but he never stopped.

Ellis would look out the car window at the octagonal-shaped brick building and all the people in Colonial costumes walking around. Finally he asked his father about it.

"That's a place that talks about slavery. We don't talk about that," his dad said.

The boy didn't ask again.

"When Daddy spoke, you didn't argue," Ellis recalls.

It was from this beginning that Ellis later became, in a phrase, the father of African-American history at Colonial Williamsburg. The program is 20 years old now, and Ellis is settled in a job in Washington, D.C., giving speeches and consulting with museums across the country.

But the work he started in his hometown has gained such momentum that the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation wove it into a storyline years ago. This year, the story of slavery in colonial Virginia becomes a focus of the Historic Area.

"I would never, in my wildest dreams, have thought they'd have 'Enslaving Virginia' as a theme for a yearlong commitment," says Ellis, 47. "I am very impressed and very interested and will be watching."

To call his former work with the foundation a "job" would be like saying 19th century American explorers were vacationing when they traveled across the Northwest.

Ellis' work is more like a passion - a mission, almost.

He's calm and controlled, but he gets under people's skin. He's a country boy, but he has a doctorate and works in the nation's capital. He plays the banjo, but he has a black belt in karate.

"He has a presence," says Bill Pfeifer, director of orientation and admission for Colonial Williamsburg. "He looks people in the eye."

Rex Ellis grew up in Williamsburg in the days of separate neighborhoods, separate schools and separate businesses for blacks and whites.

He was raised in a small colonial brick house on Queens Creek Road outside Williamsburg, where his mother still lives. In Ellis' youth, things were a little different. Children played together for hours. Parents fed each other's youngsters at lunchtime. Parents disciplined the children when it needed to be done.

"If I did something bad at a neighbor's house, it was nothing for a neighbor to punish me and then call my mama," Ellis says. "Then, when I went home, she'd be waiting with the switch, too."

Some days, he would visit an aunt, sit on her front porch with his cousins and watch the coal trains go by.

Things were also different outside the neighborhood.

Blacks and whites didn't go to the same schools, drink from the same public water fountains or even use the same barber shops.

Ellis attended Frederick Douglass Elementary, the school for black children, named after the famous 19th century abolitionist. Ellis went to Tony's to get haircuts, when Ellis' father didn't cut his hair. The barber, Tony Moore, owned a barber shop for blacks.

At the barber shop, "It was OK to say things, and it was OK to talk political," Ellis says.

In 1963, he remembers people talking about who was going to the March on Washington. They would travel together on a bus and Ellis wanted to go, too. He didn't understand the historic significance of this event at the time, but he knew that it was important and wanted to go. His parents said no.

At the march, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his now-famous "I Have A Dream" speech, which galvanized the civil rights movement.

While elsewhere the world began to change, life went on as it always had for Ellis. He went to school. He visited friends. He watched his daddy fly planes on Sundays.

His father worked as a brick mason, but he loved to fly. He was one of the only black men in the area who learned to fly, Ellis says. He would watch his dad take off, circle the airport, plummet down toward the ground and sail back up again.

Ellis says he loved to watch his father fly but enjoyed acting and wanted to know more about history.

"We didn't learn about black writers, or black scientists, or black inventors or anything like that," he recalls.

Ellis went to York High the first year it was integrated.

It was where he first learned to be a bridge between the black and white communities.

It was 1968, and a group of black students pulled Ellis from his Spanish class. They had just been told that King was dead.

"They said, 'Rex, you know how to talk to these white people. You tell them, that if that flag is not at half mast, we're going to put it there.' "

Ellis told the principal his classmates were upset and there could be trouble. The principal said he couldn't do anything about it unless the governor ordered the flag lowered. But the principal finally agreed to take action if the state did not. Ellis brought the message back to his classmates, who calmed down.

After high school, Ellis enrolled at Virginia Commonwealth University and majored in theater. He earned a master's degree in fine arts from Wayne State University in Detroit, then moved to upstate New York.